


waterfalls and landslides

by decayinghorizon



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, Implied Relationships, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-16
Updated: 2017-04-16
Packaged: 2018-10-19 13:30:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10640817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/decayinghorizon/pseuds/decayinghorizon
Summary: they deal with things they shouldn't have to face, pasts and presents that won't leave them alone.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Warning that this is a little rambly, a lot sad, and pretty much made of metaphors. I really need to write something other than angst for them but the show keeps making them sad so here I am.  
> title (sort of) comes from [Life Is a Long Time by Los Campesinos!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRJj5AwTER0)

-j-

it's his story, but it's not. he narrates, but as an omniscient being, a phantom, the illusion of a god.  
in this story, he's not quite a human being; he's an observer, a novel detective, the concept of a writer, one of the incomparable greats. it's a far stretch from the truth, which is how he likes it, putting himself on a pedestal he could never reach in his real life. this novel isn't his tell-all, it's not about his pain or his tragedy, his sad reality. it's about a different broken boy, one who could've had more of a chance than him. it's his escape, because he's still here. he has the opportunity to live and breathe and enjoy his life, but he sits in a corner alone and writes about a dead boy. 

this is how he'll always be, alone and abandoned in a world that's not for him, looking in on lives he could never hope to have. he imagines himself whole, who he would be if he had never been broken or even cracked, maybe if all the cracks just grew back stronger like a bone fracture held tight together with plaster and glue.  
it won't ever be who he is.

he's fragile, no matter what he pretends. every rock thrown breaks glass and sinks to the dark ocean depths of his stomach, and everything he never says is a message in a bottle lost at sea.  
no one would willingly brave his rocky shores, and his rough waters wreck ships before they ever have the chance to sail.  
he's a white flag waving in the blurry distance, a surrender with a skull and crossbones, giving up, collecting ghosts like gold, digging up bones like buried treasure.  
he's his own dark cave, hiding deep inside himself, his thoughts slippery stalactites that drip hopelessness and ooze doubt, stalagmites at his feet anchoring memories he'd rather forget, together trapping him in the sharp jaws of his own misery.  
at times, it feels like he's haunting himself, his mind projecting holograms of who he used to be; shallow, idealized versions of his 10 year old self running incorporeal through caverns and suffocating twisting tunnels with no regard for claustrophobia, and always, always, with Archie chasing after, their hollow ringing laughter mingling and echoing off of the towering walls he's built to hold himself in, and he's tightening the rope he tied around his waist to keep himself together, to lead him back out of the mythological maze he's made and lost himself in, to stop from feeding himself to the monster he'll find at the end.

in his nightmares, he always finds himself underwater, with salt burning his open eyes and the back of his throat as he breathes in through his nose, sinking under his skin to sting the undersides of his palms shining eerily pale in the murky water. he doesnt scream, just watches seaweed sway with the tides and lets the salt water leaking from his eyes become one with the sea, feeling proud to be a part of something. he's serene, calmly sinking; unlike Jason Blossom, he won't let the currents carry him away. 

when he writes, he can never get his ends to connect or his punctuation quite right, always missing an ellipses, confusing colons and commas, never knowing the right time to exclaim, to diverge or reclaim plot lines, to explain himself while rearranging everyone else, to estrange himself while he pieces them all together.  
he wants to tear himself out of the narration, crumple freshly printed pages and slash X's across new notebooks, smash an inkwell and hide his words underneath its viscous black veil, become invisible under typewriter correction tape, hit his backspace key until he ceases to exist.  
he wants to burn it all and start from scratch, rewrite, relive. never relearn, keep making the same mistakes, keep hating them and himself and never, ever change.

it's not his story, and that's for the best, because if it was he'd rip himself to shreds.

-a-

he needs to hold the world on his shoulders. he needs to own up to his mistakes, because all of them are such heavy burdens. he's a burden. on his father who does everything (too much) for him, on his friends who deserve better, his newly ex girlfriend who is worth so much more than he could give. he always manages to mess things up, to break everything he touches, no matter how good his intentions tend to be. 

he's solid, brave when he needs to be but he's so, so fragile. he's vulnerable and breakable and nobody can know because they all have better things to worry about, he doesn't want to put his problems on them, to bother them, to become a weight on their shoulders and weigh and break them down when he should be able to handle things on his own.  
he should be, but he's weak and he's stupid and everything always falls apart, the earth crumbles beneath his feet and he's always diving off cliffs and onto ledges too precarious to hold him and they'll always break, too, he'll break them with the weight of his mistakes like he drags down everything and everyone else, and he can't escape the cycle because he can't escape himself, or his brain that angers and speaks too quickly and feels emotions too deeply and suddenly to figure them out before he does damage he can't fix, before he can put eraser to paper and rub out the wrongs. before it's too late to try, and he streaks black across the page with that eraser worn down from years of missteps and misspellings and evidence of an entire life lived wrong, and when he tries to fix it he rips holes and leaves it hopeless and mangled. he tips the scales out of balance, always out of balance, and he can never get it right, get anything right. everything he does hurts someone, makes things difficult, his help does nothing but make everything worse.  
he tries, but he doesn't know why anymore, why he thinks any next time will be different, that he'll suddenly understand and be able to fix the things that have made him fuck up all his life, that he can suddenly break the curse, find this fatal flaw that makes him a failure. 

he'll never be enough for himself or for anyone else, and he spells it out with fists in punching bags, with badly written sheet music and stage fright too big to overcome without the friends who give him too much. he throws himself into reckless situations, into fights to protect people who mean more than him, to get battered and be bruised like maybe he deserves. to feel something that isn't worthlessness or failure, to feel tangible pain instead of the frustrating emotion he can't articulate, can never describe in the right way, or with the right depth. it's always coming out shallow and useless, pop song feelings for radio hits, one note and bland on his acoustic guitar, sounding perfect on recording but echoing back out of tune. always this discord between perception and real life.  
because on paper, he's perfect. he's a varsity football player and a musician and he's never without people to love, without girls who want him. he's got a supportive dad and a good, stable life, roots in the ground of a small, cozy town that used to be unshakable. but there's that gunshot, and Jason Blossom, and the teacher and her earthquake, the aftershocks she left behind, the panic attacks and the guilt and the empty feeling of being used.  
the way he sees his best friend drowning and can't stop it, not really. 

he keeps pulling Jughead above water just long enough for him to catch his breath before he's dragged back down like there's an anchor tied tight to his ankle and archie can't hold his breath long enough to cut him free, can't dive deep enough to see where they'll end up.  
another failure in his neverending timeline of them, another impossible situation that he could maybe solve if he was anyone but himself.  
for now, he just treads water, keeps pulling, and waits until they're rescued or they both sink.

he plucks guitar strings while Jughead's out, pieces together songs for him that he'll never hear, songs for himself that he doesn't want to hear, words that he has to say and face. he's got pages and pages of paper ripped to shreds because the words were about her, so many words wasted on Her, so many feelings that he should never have felt that've carved a hollow cavern in his chest, deep catacombs empty and terrifying in the dark of his room at night, reasons he can't sleep as well as he used to. he tries to explore them, sometimes, but all his secrets and mistakes bounce off every wall and back to him, reverberate through him at decibels that feel unsafe, intensity that he's afraid to face, that he knows will cut through him and drop him to his knees, reduce him to sobs and shakes and he doesn't want to be that, doesn't want his weakness to show on the outside, too.

sometimes he snaps pencils with the force of his words, lead puncturing holes in all his notebooks and dragging broken emotion with it, fragments of thought that never fit together just right, chords written in the wrong tuning. always something off, something only he can hear in every song that he plays back a hundred times and that leave him with no more answers than he began with. he tries to untangle himself only to end up more twisted than before, hopeless mazes full of dead ends.

sometimes his strings snap and leave welts across his hands, and his shaking fingers can't find the dexterity to restring and start over, and he gives up like he's never wanted to give up, to reveal how lost he really is, how broken.  
he's always hiding in a sunlight glare, so bright that no one ever looks directly at him, not really. he's all angles and refraction, diverting attention away from himself by letting everyone see what they want from him, surface level happiness to hide the storm inside.

and when the facade is gone, when the sun hides behind clouds and leaves him open in the gray light of day, he has nothing left.

-j & a-

they fit together in a strange sort of way, pieces from different puzzle boxes that weren't made to connect, their pictures never matching, their opposite edges clashing when they meet. but they always readjust, eventually, accommodate their differences and swap out the conflicting pieces for more comfortable fits, fall apart and back together when the trouble starts. 

now they're drowning, and everything's crumbling around them, but they're keeping each other level, they're holding their heads above water and holding their breaths when they can't stay afloat. they're chasing each other through hollow caves with hands twined and whispering secrets in the endless dark, barely audible above the steady rush of water eroding stone.

they don't quite understand each other, shouldn't, weren't meant to, but they trust one another, even after everything. they broke, but all their shards were salvageable, windows turned to red and blue stained glass and arranged into new masterpieces.  
they write, about themselves and one another and the ways they see the world in ink and guitar tabs, lyrics and narratives. they're barely concealed storms waiting on different horizons, and they're waiting for each other to need them, to hold tight and calm their pouring rain. 

they mess up in expected ways, and fight and lie and make choices that push them apart, that drift them back out to sea toward opposite shores and strand them in open water.  
but the currents always bring them back with apologies and air thick with salt and remorse, their fault lines stitching themselves back together, converging plates shifting back to their rightful places underground.

when they're together, the earth still shakes, but in gentler tremors that can't knock them down, and their mistakes still matter but the mazes have exits and monsters don't exist, knots are temporary constructions and their memories don't have the power to destroy them. 

they find solace in each other, comfort in clinging to life preservers, and hope that one day they'll be okay.


End file.
